This is largely a note to myself, to find later. This has already happened to me several times and I forget how to resolve this every time. The problem is that after some type of system update of one kind or another, Chrome will start causing the X.org server to crash. This sometimes happens immediately on login and sometimes there is a delay before the crash.

The solution? Reinstall the NVIDIA video driver.

This has been my experience with Slackware, I don’t know if other distros run into the same problem.

Posted in Linux | Comments Off on What to do when Chrome mysteriously crashes the X.org server

Recently, I had become aware that Anki 2.0 was in beta through my friend Tom, who is working on making some changes to the MCD Support plugin so that it supports languages like Spanish as well as it does Japanese. Despite this awareness, it never crossed my mind that I might need to update the Esperanto Support addon that I wrote a couple years ago until I received an email from Damien Elmes, the author of Anki, that it was time to look at doing so.

I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to finally get on GitHub, since this project is very small and would not require a lot of work to move it to its new home. The process of getting setup on GitHub was pretty easy thanks to their excellent documentation.

Also easy was upgrading my code to work with Anki 2.0. Although the code needed significant changes, the excellent documentation for writing addons for Anki 2.0 had everything I needed to know. If this documentation existed for the older version of Anki, I never saw it, so I’m glad that an obvious effort was put into creating it.

This post is a result of many attempts at trying to find an existing solution, deciding that nothing did what I needed, and writing the code myself. Specifically, I wanted to be able to verify whether or not that a file is a valid MP3 file from Python. I did not want any dependency on non-Python code (for cross-platform reasons), nor did I need to encode, decode, play, record, or any other such operations to the file. I just needed to know if it was an MP3 or not, and that is all. Oh yeah, and the file will probably have a random file name without the .mp3 extension.

At first, I downloaded several python libraries. The documentation was poor on most of them so I had to experiment to figure out if they did what I needed. All were failures or required something external like ffmpeg. I found library that seemed to check if an mp3 file was valid, but discovered it only worked if the file was named with the mp3 extension. A closer look at its code revealed that it was just checking the file’s mime-type based on the file extension. That was useless for me.

So I decided that this was something I needed to do myself. With this mp3 file format specification as a reference, I sat down and wrote the code that follows, which seems to work very well. Basically the code searches for the first valid audio frame, makes sure that the frame’s header values are sane, and then checks that the second frame seems to start where it should. This code does not decode any audio in those frames.

So I decided to learn Esperanto, which as an avid user of the SRS application Anki, meant I needed to either enter Esperanto’s special characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) into my flash cards, which can’t easily be typed with the US International keyboard layout, or I could deal with the ugly “x method” workaround (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux). At first, I was only creating Esperanto cards from my Linux computers at home, which let me use an Esperanto keyboard layout to type in the special characters. Pretty soon though, I found myself creating cards from my Windows machine at work during breaks. There is no Esperanto keyboard layout in Windows by default, so I tried to install some third party keyboard layouts without success. I eventually came across a program called Ek, which seemed to do the job of letting me type special characters, except in Anki where it would only type “ĉ”. So I just dealt with the “x method” and was typing words like vojagxas instead of vojaĝas. I don’t know why, but after a while all the x’s began to really bother me. I didn’t want to see mangxi in my flash cards, it just doesn’t seem as natural as manĝi does. So I did what any other software developer would do….

I wrote some code.

Specifically, I wrote a plugin for Anki which converts all those terrible cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, and ux combinations into the aesthetically pleasing ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ. ŝ. and ŭ characters. Prior to this I’ve never written a plugin for Anki, and even now I claim no expertise. Anki is written in Python, and so are its plugins. I found a plugin that adds some support for the German language to Anki and used that as a model to build my plugin.

To use the Esperanto plugin, open Anki, go to File -> Download -> Shared Plugin. Type “esperanto” into the search box. My plugin is the only one that matches that search, so it should be highlighted already. The plugin is called “Esperanto Support for Anki”. Click Ok and it should download and install for you. In your deck, when you want to add a card for Esperanto, make sure the card is using the “Esperanto” model rather than “Basic” model.

I’m open to suggestions and feedback, and if you are curious about the code at all, open up your Anki plugins folder and take it a look. The code is right there and it’s very simple.

So aside from my day job and my family, I’ve been keeping myself busy since December working on a project with my friend Thomas that we’ve released to the public just a few weeks ago. That project is RhinoSpike, a web site where people can submit text in a foreign language to be read aloud and recorded by native speakers of that language. In return, people can read and record themselves reading texts submitted in their native language for students of that language. It’s swap meet of mp3 files, only instead of copyrighted music, these mp3 files contain the voice and sound of many languages worldwide! I consider it my small and humble contribution to the goal of bringing peace and goodwill towards men through learning each others language.

The entire venture is a part-time deal for myself and Thomas, because we both have day jobs. So we had to maximize the effect of our efforts by building on a platform that provides all of the basic stuff that just about any website needs these days. That platform for us is Pinax, which is itself built on top of Django in the Python programming language. I can’t say enough good things about Pinax because it let us focus on what was unique to our site, while Pinax handled user authentication, OpenID, avatars, Gravatar, social network features like friends and messaging, announcements, administration, error handling, internationalization, and so much more that we actually had to strip out some of the built-in features because we felt it was too much for our site. These features are very modular and allowed us to essentially turn them on and off as if by a switch.

This project has been a great learning experience for me and continues to be so. In just three weeks we have almost 900 users, who mostly have found their way to our site via word of mouth on Twitter and some greatlanguagelearningblogs. These users have been making many suggestions to make RhinoSpike even better, some of which we’ve already implemented and many more which we plan to do soon.

If you haven’t done so already, check RhinoSpike out, and tell me what you think! I’d love to hear it!